The godawful Star Wars holiday special you were never meant to see

Quick: what’s the worst Star Wars movie ever? Seems pretty obvious, right? You might say to yourself: “Surely nothing can be worse than the beige mediocrity that is The Phantom Menace. Surely.”

But you’d be wrong. Terribly, horribly wrong.

You see, long before Jar Jar Abrams took the reins, back in the days before the Empire, there was a young visionary named George Lucas.

It was a long time ago, in a Hollywood far far away, in a decade called the 1970s, and people did enough coke to think greenlighting Star Wars was a good idea. But cocaine costs money. And soon enough, Lucas was under pressure to maximize profits.

Back then, George Lucas was good and pure. He was the best starfighter in the galaxy. But somewhere along the way, he went to the dark side. So far into the dark side, in fact, that he decided to ruin the whole franchise with that terrible prequels trilogy that we all love to hate.

But how did this happen? How did the genius mind behind the original trilogy become so corrupted? It all started when he made the worst Star Wars movie ever, a film so bad that he’s tried to cover it up ever since.

It was called The Star Wars Holiday Special, and you can watch it in full below if you’re a masochist.

This is just excruciatingly bad. Chewbacca’s family: why?? And why would a race of alien warriors have such a bland, politically correct-sounding holiday? Life Day? Really? This is definitely when Lucas started getting corny.

We get a mishmash of bad Wookie slapstick, Carrie Fisher singing, out of place animated sequences and a Bea Arthur cameo. And this was on primetime TV at the time!

For decades, Lucas was able to cover this up and conceal the beginning of his journey into Sithdom. But the signs were there – 1986’s Howard the Duck, for example, was clearly the work of a Sith Lord. Although Willow was pretty good, come to think of it.

Anyway, thanks to the magic of YouTube, we can now all inflict this godawful holiday special on ourselves, and finally see where it all started to go wrong.

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